The Collector

Erika stared at the woman’s mouth. Mimi Tran had thin lips and a bad overbite, as well as a penchant for dark lipstick. Erika would have suggested a lighter shade.

She walked slowly around the body, getting to that place in her head where all other considerations melted away and she focused right here, right now.

There were three basic methods of determining time of death. Rigor mortis usually set in three hours afterward, beginning in the facial muscles, then slowly spreading to the extremities. Approximately thirty-six hours later, the process reversed itself and the body became supple again. To Erika’s trained eye, Mimi Tran appeared stiff as a board.

As well as assessing rigor, the medical examiner would take a temperature reading. A number of factors, including Tran’s size and the hot room, would determine a possible time of death, but the process was far from exact.

Then there was lividity, during which red blood cells eventually leak into the body from the capillaries, making a permanent color change on the skin where the blood settles like sediment in a muddy pond. With her pen, Erika pulled back the collar of Tran’s St. John suit to expose the skin where one shoulder blade pressed against the carpet. The skin was a deep wine-red, showing the body hadn’t been moved since the heart stopped.

With her latex-gloved hand, Erika pulled out a magnifying glass from inside her jacket pocket. She knelt down. The bird’s head stuffed inside the victim’s mouth…it was elemental, almost primitive. Definitely something religious or sacred.

Erika was all too familiar with these sorts of rituals. She’d grown up in Santa Ana, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant married to an American of Mexican descent. Her mother was an educated woman, but still, Santeria had been part and parcel of her upbringing.

Even for a seasoned homicide detective, the sight of those bloody, empty eye sockets might prove too much. But Erika didn’t pull away from the grotesque image. That wasn’t her style. She fell into it, trying to see where it could lead her.

Like any good investigator, Erika had a healthy dose of intuition. With time, she’d come to realize hers was sharper than most. Seven called her ability “uncanny.” Her mother had a different name for it. El don de la doble vista. Only, Erika wasn’t buying that sixth sense crap. Her job required a sharp eye and tedious hours gathering evidence. That’s what got convictions in the courtroom. If good instincts and a little imagination helped, well, hell. Why not?

She cocked her head in thought. The victim was a psychic. A successful one, judging from the posh surroundings and the high-end jewelry.

So, this was about power. But what kind? Money? Prestige? Warring factions in the occult world here in Little Saigon?

Or was this about something more sinister? Had Mimi Tran been searching for a darker power?

Erika frowned. She had experience with the damage that sort of struggle could cause. The need for miracles. The lies behind the desire to control.

She turned her focus to the victim’s hands. Defensive marks. Mimi Tran had put up a fight. But the missing eyes…it seemed almost a cliché. The idea that, as a psychic, Mimi Tran had “the sight.”

“So what’s the connection to the bird’s head?” Erika asked herself.

Taking out a penlight, she pointed the beam into the victim’s mouth. With the magnifying glass in her other latex-gloved hand, she peered closer.

Something there? Inside the bird’s beak?

“Hey, Roland?” She motioned over the tech.

She had him take a couple of close-up shots. She pulled out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from her jacket pocket. With the penlight held between her teeth, she knelt carefully over the body.

She remembered a game she used to play with her brother as a kid. Operation. The goal was to use tweezers to remove tiny plastic game pieces from a body without touching the sides. Her brother and mother always messed up, but not Erika.

Slowly, she pried loose the object from inside the tiny bird’s beak. In the beam of the flashlight, the thing glowed a rich sapphire-blue.

It looked like a glass bead. Or maybe more like a crude gem?

“Holy shit,” the tech said, snapping more pictures. “What is that?”

Erika carefully placed the bead in the plastic evidence bag. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

She put away the penlight and held the plastic bag up to the ceiling light. Suddenly, the glass bead turned a bloodred color.

Erika glanced upward. The lights in this room were fluorescent…

Shielding the bead with her body, she again reached for the penlight. As soon as the incandescent light struck the bead, the color of the gem changed back to a dark blue.

And something else. Something inside the bead flashed white. The gem appeared to catch the light, like one of those star sapphires. Only, in this case, a single white stripe appeared, making the thing look like a cat’s eye.

“Weird,” the tech said, snapping a few more pictures for good measure.

Erika glanced back at the blinded body of Mimi Tran.

She told Roland, “Looks like it’s an eye for an eye.”

4

David Owen Gospel II felt the woman stir beside him on the bed. The fact that she was still asleep irritated him just a little bit. But he held back any reprimand. It was still early.

He reached and stroked the black sleek hair, admiring her lovely naked back. He considered himself a collector, and this woman was one of his finest pieces.

Her name was Velvet. He was certain that wasn’t her real name. Most likely, it was the translation of her Vietnamese name. In Vietnam, many first names had special meanings, like Kim for gold, or Tam for heart.

David thought the name suited her. Her skin, her dark, liquid eyes and waist-length hair, all of it felt rich and smooth.

He always gave her jewelry. He liked that best about Velvet. She was high-class, never grasping for his money. Jewelry seemed so much more civilized an exchange. And he knew she found him attractive; many women did, liking that air of power that could only come with age and experience. And David kept himself fit. Velvet had often complimented him about his gray eyes and silver hair. She didn’t have a problem with the age gap—almost forty years—between them.

As soon as she felt his touch, she turned and kissed him, gracing him with that lovely perfect smile as she caressed his face. But Velvet knew her business. Quickly, she slipped out from beneath the silk sheets. Donning a robe he’d bought her, an artistry of lace from a particularly fabulous lingerie shop in Paris, she hurried off to the kitchen.

Over a breakfast of jackfruit Danish and Vietnamese drip coffee, he read the paper. His beautiful Velvet sat across from him in the condo’s jasmine-scented courtyard, reading some tome on corporate taxes. Velvet was finishing her law degree at Whittier. He looked forward to hiring her on as in-house counsel for Gospel Enterprises, a privately owned development company that made more than the gross national product of most small countries.

It wouldn’t be easy to lure her in—she’d have many lucrative job offers. David anticipated that Sam Vi, Velvet’s thug of a cousin, would be his chief rival. David smiled against his coffee cup. He knew work at Gospel Enterprises would appeal to Velvet’s imagination. What could she really do for Sam other than keep his ass out of jail?

Of course, she’d have to get over the whole sleeping-with-the-boss issue. That’s one of the things he found tantalizing about Velvet. She had scruples.

Today, she would find a beautiful pair of ruby earrings waiting for her on the bedside table—he’d bought them just last week. They were antiques, presumably worn by Marie Antoinette herself, although he wasn’t naive enough to pay a premium for something so improbable. But Velvet would like the story.

He reached for the newspaper, thinking of what Velvet would look like wearing the earrings and nothing else. Suddenly, the image of her naked and reaching for him vanished.

David sat up, staring at the newspaper on the table. The smile faded from his face as he read the headline: Vietnamese Fortune-Teller Murdered in Ritual Killing.

There was a photograph of Mimi. A publicity shot by the looks of it, taken some years ago. He felt his body go numb.

“What’s the matter, David?”

Velvet didn’t have a hint of an accent. Though her parents had immigrated, she’d been born in Orange Country and was American through and through. She looked at him anxiously. Her eyes dropped to the newspaper.

“Oh, my God!” Her law book fell to the floor as she stood. “Oh, my God. I have to call Sam.”

David closed his eyes, hearing Velvet’s bare feet on the kitchen tile as she raced for the phone inside. His whole life wasn’t just crashing down around him, he told himself. It wasn’t.

He didn’t wait for Velvet to get off the phone. He wasn’t going to fight Sam for her attention, not now. Back in the bedroom, he dressed quickly. Within a few minutes, he was driving like a demon, weaving through traffic on the 55 Freeway to reach the empty carpool lane. He was alone in the vehicle, but didn’t worry about being pulled over in the black Aston Martin he drove at breakneck speed. David Gospel paid for posh dinners at fund-raisers for important candidates to local and state office. He didn’t pay for anything as mundane as a speeding ticket.

When he arrived home, he found his wife waiting in the front room. Meredith rose to her feet from the sofa, a mousy woman who looked as if she were trying to make herself disappear, she was so thin. On the glass coffee table, she had the morning paper opened to Mimi Tran’s photograph.

“It’s not what you think,” she said in that whisper of a voice.

Over the years, David had come to realize it was her voice he hated most—more than her Bible-thumping or her thinning brown hair, or even that stick figure she preserved like some prima ballerina. Her voice grated in its softness. It seemed to say, Don’t pay attention, I’m not here, I won’t disturb.

“David?”

He ignored her, instead heading for the stairs. The house had been designed around its fabulous view of the main channel and a sweeping staircase with its railing made entirely of Lalique crystal. But the beauty was lost to him now as he headed for his office, his wife at his heels.

“Listen to me, David. You’re wrong! You’ve been wrong all along! Please, David—”

He shut the office door in her face. His wife made some feeble attempt at a knock, but even in anger she couldn’t manage the strength for a decent pounding. Him, he would have used both hands. Knock the fucking door down!

There’d been a time when Meredith could give as good as she got. But that all changed after she found God. These days, his wife was nothing more than a dried-up Puritan of a woman. A fanatic.

He grabbed the remote control off his desk and gunned it at the mirrored wall across the office, punching in the code. Immediately, a section slid open, revealing a hidden room behind the glass.

Gospel Enterprises had many businesses under its corporate umbrella, including a security company specializing in safe rooms or “panic rooms,” a place sealed off from the rest of the house where clients could wait out a home invasion until the police or on-site security arrived on the scene to save the day.

David’s room had a very special purpose. The place was more like a giant walk-in vault. Inside, he could control temperature and humidity. Hell, he could house the fucking Mona Lisa here if he had to, probably under better conditions than the Louvre and its conga line of tourists.

Inside the vault room, he punched in yet another code, this time using a keypad on the wall just above the built-in wooden cabinetry, one of five such keypads in the room. A velvet-lined drawer slid open, the kind often used to house expensive jewelry. David’s held a much different collection.

He stared down at the clay tablet written in a script adapted from cuneiform, one of the oldest written representations. This particular tablet dated back to the seventh century B.C., but the story from ancient Sumeria was far older. The Epic of Gilgamesh was, in fact, the oldest written story on Earth.

There was a heated debate in archaeological and linguistic circles concerning whether the epic was composed of eleven or twelve clay tablets. Many translations didn’t include the twelfth tablet, considered by some to be an independent story, or perhaps more of a “sequel.” But David knew better. He was staring at a missing thirteenth tablet, one he had purchased for his collection through the efforts of people like the now very dead Mimi Tran.

A necklace lay to the right of the tablet. It was a beautiful piece, the unstrung beads placed in a half circle around a central crystal, jewelry purported to have belonged to the goddess Athena herself. In this light, the gems appeared a deep blue. But he knew how easily the crystals could change to a bloodred.

The central stone, the Eye, looked more like a milky, raw diamond the size of a peach pit. In the low light, it had a lovely blue sheen. Like flaws, bits of metal floated, trapped inside. Several strands of wire had been wrapped around the crystal, creating a pendant that could hang from a necklace. It stared up at him, clouded and unseeing.

He felt himself shaking. There was little in this world that David feared. Normally, it was matters beyond the physical realm that held his imagination. But his son—Owen’s capacity to completely fuck up—could grab David by the throat and bring him to his knees.

Leaving the drawer open, he stepped out of the vault. He dropped onto the leather couch of his office and stared at the mirrored opening, the remote still in his hand. Inside that vault waited some of the greatest treasures the world of the occult had to offer. Precious pieces he’d carefully brought together, willing to meet the price of the greediest tomb raider.

David was not a young man. It had taken forty-two of his sixty-plus years to gather his collection. The tablet, of course, was the centerpiece, a map that had led him to the Eye of Athena. In Mimi’s hands, he’d seen that dead crystal glimmer to life. And there were other treasures mentioned in the thirteenth tablet, gifts that, according to legend, had been given to Gilgamesh by the wild man Enkidu, magical objects Mimi Tran, with Sam Vi’s connections in the illegal trade of artifacts, had vowed to help David find.

But now Mimi was dead.

“Fucking Owen,” he said, cursing his son.

The problem, of course, was that this had all happened before. Another woman, a psychic, just like Mimi. Seven years ago, the police had come to David’s door with a search warrant. They’d turned the place upside down, looking for their evidence, finding nothing. David had made damn sure of it….

Owen had been eighteen years old—old enough, David had hoped, to cover his tracks. But no. He had found Owen sitting next to the spa in back of their Newport home, acting for all the world as if nothing was wrong.

Only, the kid had been licking blood off his fingers.

Instinctively, David knew the blood wasn’t Owen’s. Unfortunately, there’d been a hell of a lot of it. The asshole had tracked it through the house…his car had been filthy with it. The cleanup had been a bitch.

Luckily, David had discovered his idiot of a son before the cops could get their hands on him.

Seven years ago, David had thought he was in the clear, siccing his bulldog lawyers on the city, threatening to sue whoever had the balls to point the finger his way. Shit, he’d brought down more than one career in that battle.

And now the nightmare was starting all over again? No way. No fucking way.

There came another tap at the door, the sound so meek he would have missed it if the room hadn’t been perfectly quiet. With a sigh, he punched in the code to shut the mirrored door to the vault.

“Come the fuck in, Meredith.”

Like a good servant, she opened the door and let herself in, leading with her offering: a tray holding a martini glass and shaker. Jesus, the woman had timing.

She gave him a nervous smile. “I thought you might like a drink.”

“Really.” His wife didn’t drink, but she was good at peddling the stuff. Especially at times like this. She was the family’s anesthesiologist, dispensing her drugs to numb away the world.

She moved soundlessly to put the tray down on the glass coffee table before the leather sofa where he sat. She poured the martini from the shaker into the glass and sat down, leaving plenty of space between them.

“You’re wrong about Owen.” She smoothed the skirt of her dress over her knees and folded her manicured hands neatly on her lap. In another life, Meredith had sported designers like Prada. These days, her simple print dresses looked more like something she’d picked up at Wal-Mart.

“Owen has made mistakes,” she continued, “but we’re his parents, David. We need to forgive and forget. He’s different now, a changed man since his missionary work.”

She didn’t dare look at him as she spoke. Instead, she stared ahead, giving him a view of her profile. His wife had a perfect nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon. Again, another life…the one they’d lived before Owen.

David knew all parents wanted to believe the best of their child. He himself had fallen into that trap. He’d given Owen every advantage, right? What more could he have done?

But then comes the day when a parent realizes the truth. Their world falls apart, and the truth hits them square between the eyes.

For David, a master collector, that day had come long ago. The day he’d finally realized that his son, his perfect and beautiful little boy, had started a collection of his own.

Owen had been ten years old. It still turned David’s stomach, a thought of those bloody bits and pieces he had found buried in the tin box out in the rose garden. When he’d confronted Owen, the kid had just stared up at him with those strange, unblinking eyes.

Even after that, David made excuses. He told himself it was just some silly mistake, those bloody pieces. He had tried to share a few stories, and the boy had become confused. David and Meredith discussed the situation with Owen’s psychiatrist, someone they could trust to keep a secret. The doctor had concurred. His son wasn’t dangerous. Just misguided.

Dr. Friedman explained that David’s temper didn’t help. But there David might disagree. Beating the crap out of Owen may not have helped his son’s condition, but is sure as hell made David feel better.

For a while, it seemed as if things were going to be okay. Until the day Owen turned eighteen and the cops showed up at their door asking about Michelle Larson.

“Where is he?” David asked now, not touching the drink.

Meredith kept staring straight ahead. “I don’t know.”

“Hiding. Like a coward.”

Her head snapped around. She gave him a venomous look. Only for Owen did she ever dare put up a fight. “Owen is working. You should know—he does work for you, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t keep track of every employee, Meredith.”

Of course he’d called the Newport Beach offices. It was the first thing he’d done on the drive home. According to his assistant, Owen was conveniently out. An art opening for some friend down in Laguna.

David remembered throwing the cell against the dashboard, losing it. He could still see that image of Mimi in his head, her photo in the paper bringing back thoughts of Michelle and her death.

When they’d first started taking Owen to Dr. Friedman, he’d explained how Owen had somehow gotten it all mixed up in his head, the collection thing. Because of the stories David had shared with his son. Apparently, the world of the occult did not make for good bedtime conversation.

Owen had been too young to understand where his dad was coming from. In his sessions, he kept talking about the Moon Fairy. When Dr. Friedman asked David what that meant, he’d feigned ignorance. But he knew.

The Moon Fairy was one of several bedtime stories that David had shared with his son. Like Gilgamesh, the Moon Fairy was about a man’s quest for immortality. In the tale, a magician offers to make an elixir for the king that will make him immortal. For his potion to work, the magician would need 999 of the youngest and most beautiful children of the kingdom. The magician assures the king of the elixir’s success if the king also includes his own daughter. But the girl’s mother, the Moon Fairy, saves her by turning the girl into a rabbit and taking her to the moon.

David didn’t have a clue what the big deal was, but he’d kept quiet, knowing that Dr. Friedman would probably start blaming him again for all the kid’s problems. Like it was some kind of child abuse to tell Owen a story?

David knew he’d made mistakes, sure. Losing his temper and punishing Owen. And maybe he had kept the kid a little on edge with his tales about the occult, sometimes using his knowledge as leverage to put Owen in his place. How was that any different than the stories parents told about the Bogeyman? But Dr. Friedman explained how that, too, had messed with Owen’s psyche. Funny thing, how it was always the parents’ fault.

That’s when David realized Dr. Friedman was just like everyone else, completely full of shit. Back then, they hadn’t made the connection between Owen’s eyes and any psychological condition. Still, David had his own theories about his son’s twisted behavior and how to handle it.

Up until this morning, he’d thought he’d done just that. Neutralized the threat. David clenched his jaw. How could Rocket have let him down?

“Don’t you want the drink?” Meredith asked.

For a moment, he’d actually forgotten she was there. He took a long, hard look at her, the mother of his child.

He tried to remember who she’d been all those years ago. A feisty and elegant woman educated at Smith College back East, she was the consummate diva, the only child of Judge Martin Wescott, a man who held more than a little influence in this town.

David had never loved Meredith, true, but he’d respected her. Back then, he’d believed she was a great choice as a life partner, someone who could reign supreme among the pseudo society of Orange County, the famed OC.

Well, he couldn’t have been more wrong. And God, did he hate her for it.

He picked up the martini and ceremoniously placed it in front of his teetotaler wife. “You drink it,” he said, leaning forward menacingly. “You’re going to need it, darling.”

It was all he had to say. Almost a silent boo! Meredith jumped to her sensible Cole Haan loafers and slid the martini glass back onto the tray. She sloshed vodka over the sides of the glass the whole way to the door.

“My wife,” he said, almost laughing out loud. How many other things had she fucked up in his life?

He closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted to the core. He needed to regroup, call Rocket, his right-hand man, and get him back on the job with Owen. David didn’t have the luxury to sit here and feel sorry for himself.

He stood and punched the code into the remote once again. He walked back inside the vault as the door whooshed open. Maybe he’d always known Owen wasn’t cured. That it was all an act, Owen showing up from his travels abroad all repentant and asking for another chance.

With a sigh, David braced himself over the opened drawer, staring at the tablet and necklace housed there with such loving care, realizing that he’d need to start over now that Mimi was dead. Which meant calling Sam.

“Shit.”

He was about to close the drawer, lock up tight and take Meredith up on that martini, when something caught his eye. The pattern of the beads circling the Eye, the central crystal…he hadn’t realized it before.

He looked closer now, his heart stopping, just stopping.

There, at the back of the necklace. Was a bead missing?

He looked closer, counting quickly. He knew exactly how many beads should be circling the Eye: twelve. Only, no matter how many times he counted, he came up one short.